And burn your bridges down
by Lilith Morgana
Summary: Love never seems more terrifying than when he tells her this, never more shattering. Evelyn Trevelyan falls in love. Companion piece to "Virago". Trevelyan/Blackwall.


It comes quick or it comes slow, her grandfather used to say. But you'll _know_, lass.

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-

Thomas has soft hands and tastes of salt and sea behind the rocks, running after her into the glen down by his parents' farm. Soft hands and no words because they have very little to talk about as the years separate them, forging different worlds for a farmer's son and a Lord's daughter. She is not ready for their ways to part just yet but she cannot tell him that so instead she makes him chase her, makes him kiss and hold and _remain_ just a little while longer. Life is going to become lonely without him.

"You're pretty," he whispers generously and she doesn't shake her head, allows the lie to pass.

She is not pretty and Thomas is still Fat Thomas but it's a warm, sweet day balancing just on the edge between seasons and as gentle hands find their way underneath her tunic Evelyn throws her head back and closes her eyes.

-

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>Her grandmother Evelina – wild as an autumnal storm on the Waking Sea, her tongue sharper than a blade – came to Ostwick to marry Lord Trevelyan. Nobody wanted her to, nobody except for Grandfather who rode half-way to meet her. <em>In the snow<em>, people still say, shaking their head. _The poor fool was under her spell. _

–-

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>Knight-Captain Harrod humours her sometimes when they wait for the rest of the recruits to show up for training or when he walks with her back to the barracks, long strides across the grounds. Evelyn struggles to keep up, glancing sideways with every step because the Knight-Captain has eyes like the green fields and hands that are broad and sensitive at the same time.<p>

Rumour has it that he likes the company of recruits, that he asks them to stay behind after their training ends.

One of the Knight-Lieutenants vanished last winter; it's said she was carrying a child, it's said that it was his.

There are tiny streaks of grey in his hair, around his forehead and temples and she is mesmerized by it, by the way his mouth moves and his hands gesture in the air when he talks, by the way she thinks that perhaps today he will ask her to stay.

For two full years Evelyn waits, without words and without hope.

-

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>.<p>

Evelina who becomes a ghost and a whisper between the walls far too soon and Grandfather who sits one hour every day in her favourite part of the garden. Until the day he dies - a tall, lean shape on the bench he put there for her before their wedding so she could admire the orchids.

_Some love twice, others love many times_. Grandfather's voice would always fall in a certain way when he spoke of her, as though he wanted to be careful to let the light in, not darken her memory with his grief._ I love only once.._

_._

_-_

"We would make a good match, Lady Trevelyan. You are a woman who can look out for herself and I... er, I find that very appealing."

She feels trapped where she stands under the open sky where the stars are their sole company but his hand on her arm is a chain, holding her in place. For a moment, stretched-out and uncomfortable as it spreads in her mind, she wonders if this is what love looks like, if this is the ugly longing laid bare. Lord Nubarra, his young, handsome face lit by a peculiar sort of emotion tonight, as though he has helped himself to their entire wine cellar. Mother claims he is quite taken with her and the way she says it, every world rolling off her tongue like a foreign language, Evelyn understands that nobody is as surprised as her mother.

After a lifetime of disappointing, of causing frowns and exceptions and an frantic exchange of letters, she is tempted.

But she will not be chained and the night air is cool against her flushed cheeks as she walks away.

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>-<p>

With all my heart, Grandfather had answered when he was asked during his wedding ceremony if he wished to provide for and protect Evelina, the young woman by his side. _Not even half his age_, they said behind their backs. _She will be a widow for a long time, that one_.

And life is very long when you're lonely.

Grandfather sits on Evelina's bench every day for the rest of his life, telling Evelyn that he is never alone out there among her orchids. That he is surrounded by her because she loved him and love does not simply cease to exist the same way mortal bodies do.

Love never seems more terrifying than when he tells her this, never more shattering.

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>-<p>

A day like any other, with the rain beating down heavily, hungering for earth. They stand by the river, not quite freezing but wrapped in clothes, as if they aim to keep something else out. Watchful nights are upon them now and the clouds are heavy like mud, striving to hold them in place.

Blackwall is quiet by her side, kneeling down to examine the corpse of a young man, a young bandit killed with four arrows to his throat. It seems excessive somehow. Death should not be. She gets to her knees as well, examines the shaft of one of the arrows that feels warm under her fingertips.

"These are expensive."

If she leans to the side, just one small inch, they will be shoulder to shoulder and there's comfort in that. Comfort and a jolt of something else, something sharp and wild and strangely familiar though she cannot recall ever having sensed it before outside of her dreams. It leaves an echo, a trail.

"Assassins, you think?"

He looks at her, his face still but his eyes have those depths that she can see in him sometimes, in moments that feel like reprieves even if they aren't and like secrets even if they say nothing that cannot be known. It is, she thinks, the way he _sees_ her when he looks, the way his gaze falls hard and precise, falls right into her as though she's wide-open.

It is, she thinks, too, a new sort of habit: to seek his face in a crowd, listen carefully for his voice even if it is not speaking to her, even if he is not saying anything important at all; just a quiet notion that he's near. A new sort of desire: to keep to where he is.

Evelyn sighs. "I'm not certain. Looks like it, though."

They remain by the dead man for a little while longer, despite the rain, despite the scene. Then Blackwall leans forward, running his right hand over the corpse's pale face. It's a small gesture, barely there, but she notices it, sees how he closes the boy's eyes to the world that didn't want him and the thread of respect in that, in his touch, leaves her breathless.

"Bloody _fool_," he mutters, his voice no more than a rumble under his breath; she catches it like fire.

Next time she looks at him he's standing up, towering beside her and reaches out his hand again, to her this time. It's large and calloused like her own and impossibly warm when she takes it and gets to her feet; his thumb over the back of her hand, his palm against hers, their lines curved and bent around each other for another heartbeat before they both let go.

And Evelyn _knows_.


End file.
